Asymmetry | Granta

  • Published: 15/11/2018
  • ISBN: 9781783783625
  • 129x20mm
  • 288 pages

Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

‘A scorchingly intelligent first novel’ New York Times
‘Spellbinding’ New Yorker
‘Thrilling’ Guardian

In New York, Alice, a young editor, begins an affair with Ezra Blazer, a world-famous, much older writer. At Heathrow airport, Amar, an Iraqi-American economist en route to Kurdistan, is detained by immigration. Somehow their lives are connected, in this unconventional love story that has things to say about all of contemporary life.

 

Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry is elegant, funny, ingenious, profound and wildly enjoyable. You'll read it in one sitting, only pausing now and again to check the endpapers and confirm that this is indeed a first novel. I loved, admired and envied this novel. It's a wonder

Zadie Smith

Spellbinding... A literary phenomenon

Katy Waldman, New Yorker

Lisa Halliday's striking debut is certainly - as the title implies - a sharp examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women, innocence and experience, fame and aspiration... Daring [with] deliciously fertile ambiguities [and] a delicately devastating irony... this is a debut asking a dizzying number of questions, many to thrilling effect. That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success

Justine Jordan, Guardian

The Author

Lisa Halliday has lived in Italy since 2011. Her first novel, Asymmetry, was published in twenty languages, and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She received a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2017.

More about the author →

Lisa Halliday on Granta.com

Art & Photography | Granta 152

Labirinto

Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Lisa Halliday

‘But only a city without people is immune. Only a city in which nothing circulates, nothing changes hands, nothing flourishes.’

Lisa Halliday introduces the photography of Wiktoria Wojciechowska.

Fiction | The Online Edition

Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

An excerpt from Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry